<?php
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 * Copyright © 2019 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Talk postponed',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/03/20.jpg" alt="A view of the park" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="dreams">
	<h2>Dream journal</h2>
	<p>
		I dreamed I was at work, running the drive-through.
		I had a long line of customers.
		The head manager asked me who Elohim was.
		The fact that he asked <strong>*me*</strong> instead of someone else made me think he&apos;d found one of the notes I&apos;d written myself; I tend to write myself notes at work when I think of things, because I&apos;ve got so much going on and will no doubt forget without notes by the time I get home and can write about them in my journal.
		So I told him &quot;Elohim&quot; was the name of the Mormon god.
		He told me that no, it isn&apos;t.
		I thought he was going to tell me the Mormon god&apos;s name is &quot;Yahweh&quot; or &quot;Jehovah&quot; - I wasn&apos;t sure which he&apos;d say - so I was getting ready to explain the normal names of the holy Christian trinity to him, then how the Mormon holy trinity differed slightly.
		But then, he told me the Mormon god&apos;s name is &quot;Miracle&quot;.
		What?
		Between the absurdity of the claim and the fact that my brain&apos;s resources were mostly tied up in dealing with the line of customers, I wasn&apos;t sure what to say to the head manager.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Having binary outputs would have been really helpful for last week&apos;s unit assignment.
			There didn&apos;t seem to be a way to make the network round to a binary integer though, so we ended up with floats.
			If we could have gotten binary outputs, it would have been incredibly simple to train tour networks to a point in which they&apos;d have no error in their outputs whatsoever.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I hadn&apos;t caught from the reading material that having more than one hidden layer allows a network to lean non-linear functions while networks with only a single hidden layer are restricted to learning only linear functions.
			That would have been incredibly handy information to have last week, when were working with and tuning our own neural networks for the unit assignment.
		</p>
		<p>
			I&apos;d say supervised learning is the truest type of machine learning because it involves the machine actually learning what in means for the problem to be solved, so it&apos;s able to solve future instances of the problem.
			Unsupervised learning is more like simply sorting things into categories without having predefined categories even set up.
			It&apos;s like dumping a bunch of geometric shape blocks of various sizes and colours in front of a child and asking the child to sort them, without telling them what sort of sorting they&apos;re supposed to do.
			They might end up sorted by shape, or by colour, or by size ... or perhaps some arbitrary combination of the three with some quirky exceptions.
			It may help the human tester, in this case the child&apos;s caretaker, understand what the data set is composed of better without having to go through all the data themself.
			But what has the computer learned about the problem from the experience?
			Even this example with the child is a bit flawed, because the child likely learned something about efficient sorting through the practice they just had, which they can apply to future sorting problems.
			The computer hasn&apos;t gained any information it can put toward future problems though.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="mother">
	<h2>Mother&apos;s visit</h2>
	<p>
		I didn&apos;t get a chance to talk to my mother after all.
		She brought over Vanessa and we went out to eat, then she decided not to eat with us, and afterwards, we went straight home.
		There really wasn&apos;t a good time to bring up her insistence that I&apos;m a man.
		It&apos;ll have to wait until another time.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="webinar">
	<h2>Webinar</h2>
	<p>
		The webinar people haven&apos;t written me back, but at the same time, the missionaries cancelled our meeting for tomorrow (or more-precisely, moved it up to yesterday), so I figured I might as well attend.
		I should have made my registration the day they cancelled on me, but as I sent them that letter, I was hoping to wait until they&apos;d written back first.
		However, their registration form, when submitted, admits to maliciously discriminating against $a[Tor] users.
		I can&apos;t attend the webinar after all because it doesn&apos;t allow me to register for it.
	</p>
	<p>
		You know what that means.
		I discussed before that if technical requirements prevented my attendance, it meant that the missionaries hadn&apos;t been divinely inspired to cancel on me in order to allow me to attend.
		At that point, they could only cancel on my either because their higher being was messing with me or for reasons entirely unrelated to my desire to attend this webinar.
		I&apos;m, of course, not claiming this is a sign that there is no god or that there&apos;s a trickster god.
		If there is a god, which I again do not assert, they could easily simply not care about this and the missionaries cancelled for other reasons.
		I mean, an all-knowing being would know I wasn&apos;t able to attend the webinar either way, and would thus not act in this case.
		It just felt odd before that the missionaries cancelled on me the day I get word this webinar&apos;s going on, and it freed up my time so I could - if not for the malicious $a[Tor]-blocking - attend this presentation.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="sleep">
	<h2>Sleep schedule</h2>
	<p>
		I stayed up way too late last night.
		Part of this time was spent working on the last of my coursework, but part of it was spent just unwinding for the week.
		I got &quot;enough&quot; done for the night, so I finally went to bed.
		I didn&apos;t actually sleep late enough to still get all the rest I needed though.
		My body didn&apos;t allow that.
		So I spent the day tired.
	</p>
	<p>
		The funny part is that while I left myself enough time to sleep, get up, then finish all the stuff that was technically due today, getting less sleep gave me the time I needed to finish up the stuff that wasn&apos;t due today too.
		By my schedule, I should have also had that done today, but by the school&apos;s schedule, I technically had until 22:00 tomorrow to complete it.
		So I planned to fall behind slightly, but instead caught up completely.
	</p>
	<p>
		After dinner with my mother and Vanessa, I debated about hitting the sack early.
		On the one hand, I&apos;d be sleeping through time I didn&apos;t have any coursework.
		That&apos;d free up time I <strong>*did*</strong> have coursework, so I&apos;d have time to complete it.
		After all, if I go to be early, I&apos;ll wake up early whether I want to or not.
		And in this case, I did want to.
		On the other hand, if I stayed up until 22:05 tonight, the coursework for the coming week would post.
		I&apos;d see before going to bed whether the week was going to be as easy as I hoped it would be.
		This coming week is the final week of the term, which almost always involves no unit assignment.
		But sometimes, there&apos;s one anyway.
		And by &quot;sometimes&quot;, I mean this one time, and so far <strong>*only*</strong> that one time.
	</p>
	<p>
		In the end, I decided the added time was worth not knowing for now, and started to get ready to head to bed.
		But then, I remembered my meeting tomorrow.
		I&apos;ll be in the next city over pretty late.
		I&apos;m going to need to bike thirteen kilometres to get home, after I&apos;ve already biked thirteen kilometres to get there.
		If I get up early, I&apos;m going to be very tired on the way back; I&apos;ll be getting back home just before midnight.
		It was in my best interest to endure, and stay up later just so I&apos;d wake up later.
		It&apos;d be bad to stay up too late, but I definitely shouldn&apos;t go to bed early on a Wednesday.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
